It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company's unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg's public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?

The all-male board of Facebook makes you wonder why a company serving a user base of at least 50% half women has no female representation on the board. We told ourselves that women board directors can build value and bring win-win strategies to the table - let's #changetheratio here.

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz contrasts the all male membership of the board with Facebook's avowed social mission to empower the world and to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's powerful advocacy for women.

Facebook generally declines to comment on issues like this. It's typical of Silicon Valley's libertarian-leaning culture to believe that the best way to overcome injustices connected to gender, race, class and sexual orientation, are to ignore the existence of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. That approach may leave unresolved long-standing institutional, economic and cultural factors that stand in the way of equal opportunity and which cannot be overcome by society as a whole through the self interest and sheer force of will of people on the margins of power.

Sheryl Sandberg is the second most visible person at Facebook and will likely become a billionaire in the IPO. She's often said to be a prominent advocate of women in the workplace.

Doug Barry points out on Jezebel, though, that Sandberg's position is a very particular one: that women are fundamentally responsible for their own career development in corporate America and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Sandberg is well known for her 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Sandberg's message is directed at the elite crowd gathered at TED and adresses women who are not gaining top power positions in the organizations they work at. She offers three primary pieces of advice. "One, sit at the table," by which she means give yourself the credit you deserve and aim high. "Two, make your partner a real partner," or make sure that heterosexual married couples contain parents with equal earning power and responsibility and that men are encouraged to take responsibility around the house. "And three, don't leave before you leave," in other words keep seizing new opportunities despite the possibility you might take time off to have a child.

Those are relatively conservative political admonitions that speak primarily to the problems experienced by the women in society who are already closest to power.

Barry writes on Jezebel:

Not only is Sandberg exceptionally smart, but, after graduating from Harvard Business School, she landed a job at the World Bank as the chief of staff first for Larry H. Summers then the Treasury Secretary. A job at Google followed before she joined Facebook in 2008, an opportunity that Sandberg was prescient enough to take full advantage of. If success really is preparation meeting opportunity, Sandberg was more than prepared for her chance at professional success, but some women believe that when she insists on aiming high, she's discounting the fact that her meteoric rise owes itself, at least in part, to some very favorable circumstances (including the fact that her husband, Daniel Goldberg, is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and the couple doesn't have to worry about finding child care for their two sons).

Barry quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Talent Innovation and director for the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University:

I'm a huge fan of her accomplishments and think she's a huge role model in some ways, but I think she's overly critical of women because she's almost implying that they don't have the juice, the chutzpah, to go for it...I think she's had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition. Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they're actually derailed by other things, like they don't have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.

That paragraph had a soft ending; there are far more unpleasant ways that many women are derailed than by a lack of a sponsor at work.

Courteney Martin, on one of the web's most respected feminist blogs, Feministing, says that while Sandberg's message to individual women is valuable, it is just one story.

In essence, her message is tantamount to The American Dream for the 21st century woman: the problem is not sexism or racism or classism, the problem is not pathetic work-family policy at the federal level, the problem is not collective. The problem is you. In the Gospel of Sandberg, individual women must find partners who will share the load and negotiate fiercely, overcome their own guilt about not being able to be fully present parents, and "lean in" to their careers despite the lack of structural or systemic supports that might make that feel even slightly safe or rewarding.

Reading this profile of Sandberg, I was reminded of Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, incredible TED Talk, in which she talks about "the danger of the single story." She explains, "The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

I actually think that Sandberg is smart and has great intentions with her message that women need to dig deep and stick to their own dreams. I agree with her in many ways... This is part of the story. But it's not the whole story.

The rest of the story is better told by women who didn't grow up with lots of familial and social support, women who didn't go to Harvard, women who weren't mentored by Larry Summers, women with different definitions of success and leadership.

To look at the bright side, perhaps Facebook's social technology will itself help other women tell their stories and hear the stories of women other than the most privileged elite.

The world's largest communication network between people is taking a big financial step, it's infamously opportunistic with changing ideas of privacy and it's lead by an all-male board and a woman whose perspective on gender is likely applauded by conservatives around the world. That all seems important to discuss.

That leads into revenue sharing and growth targets between Zynga and Facebook. The developer addendum makes mention of targets and vesting options when Zynga hits certain monthly active user levels but the specifics of the agreement have been struck from the public versions of the document. As reported in the initial filing, Zynga has 146 million unique monthly active users, almost all of them on Facebook, with 232 million monthly active users between all of Zynga's games.

What is also mentioned is that Facebook and Zynga have a mutual advertising relationship where Facebook helps to provide the ads for Zynga games within the Facebook ecosystem. It is a smart move by Facebook - it helps Zynga advertise games on the platform and split the revenue from Facebook credits used to by virtual goods within the games.

Why Doesn't Facebook Just Buy Zynga?

There are a variety of reasons that Facebook does not simply absorb Zynga and the addendum sheds light on why. Foremost, it turns out that Google is indeed an investor in Zynga, as AllThingsD points out in its analysis of the addendum, and which TechCrunch reported could be as high as $100 million. Zynga has raised nearly $1 billion in its venture capital rounds and it has a lot of masters to answer to when it comes to an exit strategy. As it stands right now, Facebook gets the benefit of having Zynga under its thumb without having to pay the acquisition cost of buying the platform which, in essence, would be paying off Google (and a multitude of other investors), probably at a significant premium.

At the same time, Zynga keeps its options open for future partnerships across multiple platforms. Google will eventually release an API for Plus (in theory, at least) and would probably like to see developers add on to the platform, games included, the same way they do with Chrome and Android. Hence, it is better for Zynga to go public and have a complicated relationship with Facebook than subsist entirely within the social giant's ecosystem, precluding its own platform strategies such as with mobile or other social networks.

The developer addendum goes into great length about other types of relationships between Facebook and Zynga, such as what happens when Zynga acquires third-party games, a variety of stipulations on mobile development and acquisition, who owns the data created and so on.

The new details make for an intriguing mix. Investors will certainly weigh Zynga with their wallets come October (or so) when the six-month "quiet period" after filing an S-1 is lifted.

The social gaming company filed for an initial public offering today, which makes it the fourth major Web 2.0 company to travel down the IPO road this year. It follows LinkedIn and Pandora (both now trading) and Groupon (currently in the "quiet period" after filing earlier in June).

"To put the play macro in perspective, games have become the second most popular internet activity based on time spent, and have even surpassed email," Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, wrote to potential investors. "Our strategy from the beginning has been to build the biggest macro bet on social gaming to provide our players with the most accessible, social and fun games. Despite our rapid growth, we have been careful to build for the long term."

Pincus says that Zynga is built on the fundamental principle that games are meant to be social, reaching into the essence of Web 2.0. According to Zynga's internal metrics, players are spending 2 billion minutes a day playing Zynga games, with 60 million daily active users, 232 million monthly active users (spread across its various games) and 146 million unique month users (players who played one game at least once).

Pincus broke down Zynga's philosophy:

• Games should be accessible to everyone, anywhere, anytime.
• Games should be social.
• Games should be free.
• Games should be data driven.
• Games should be good.

Zynga Relies Almost Exclusively on Facebook

When Pincus wrote "anywhere, any time," he should have added the words "on Facebook."

Zynga has made nearly $1.5 billion in revenue since its inception in 2007 with nearly all its cash flow coming in 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, ending March 31. The company is profitable, though it warns that its rapid growth may mean that it is not profitable on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

That growth is reminiscent of Groupon's. Its IPO filing gave investors a close look at the company's financials for the first time only for them to realize that the daily deals company spends so much in acquiring and retaining users that it has not had a quarter where it posted an operating profit in its entire history. Zynga is different. Its primary operating costs are tied into data hosting through Amazon Web Services, research and development and talent (read: developer) acquisition. Zynga has about 2,000 employees, 92% of which have been hired within the last two years.

The biggest risk factor to Zynga is the fact that Facebook is its primary mode of distribution, marketing, promotion and payment. Zynga has fully implemented Facebook Credits as its primary payment plan and receives 70% of every dollar spent through the social network's payment system. When laying out the risk factors in its filing, it is no coincidence that Facebook is the first factor mentioned: "We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future."

Zynga makes nearly all of its revenues through paying players with advertising its secondary source of revenue. Of the $235 million in revenue Zynga created in the first quarter of 2011, only $12 million or so came from advertising.

Zynga is working on creating more mobile games but its business model is built on the Facebook browser platform. If Facebook is hurt, Zynga will not survive. Even with a high end of 750 million users, Facebook is not invincible. Little on the Internet has proven to be permanent.

The Value Proposition

It all boils down to "play." In its filing, Zynga makes pains to position itself as an "entertainment" company. It breaks down the world entertainment industry (which it calls the Wordwide Entertainment Market) and notes that gaming is a $31 billion dollar segment of a $1 trillion market. The biggest question for Zynga is if it can continue to innovate its games to take a slice of that pie and move to mobile devices, where the likes of Rovio's Angry Birds, continue to dominate.

Investors work with dollars. Will they put their work into play?

This news comes alongside a second report, which states that Facebook's growth is slowing down in certain key markets, including the U.S.

The CNBC article cites "people familiar with the matter" when making its claims, but Facebook declined to comment to news outlets pursuing the story. However, we've known for some time that an IPO was in Facebook's near future. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at a meeting last month that an IPO was "inevitable," notes CNBC.

Even as far back as September 2010, Facebook board member, venture capitalist and early investor Peter Thiel told reporters that Facebook was likely to go public in 2012. He, however, had pegged "late 2012" as the time frame for that.

Reports of Growth Slowdown

Facebook was also making news this week due to a separate report from Inside Facebook which states that the social network's growth has slowed down in the markets where it has been available the longest, most notably in the U.S. Here, a drop of nearly 6 million users was seen over the month of May, going from 155.2 million users to 149.2 million by month-end. Canada also fell by 1.52 million users, down to 16.6 million, while the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all lost over 100,000 users each, during the same time.

Facebook responded to these claims, saying that:

From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook on any given day."

In light of Facebook's response, Inside Facebook also compared its findings (which do come from direct measurements using Facebook's advertising tool) to other third-party services. While nothing matched up exactly, the general trends showed that in some of the social network's early adopting countries like the U.K. and Canada, gains and losses started in 2010, but growth up until then had been steady. In the U.S., fewer monthly users were seen at the beginning of the year by most of the third party services, and only one showed any growth in the disputed month of May.

Facebook Hasn't Peaked

Still, it's far too soon to say the social network has hit its peak, some experts say. In a report on PEHub, for example, social media analyst Lou Kerner of Wedbush Securities noted that the Inside Facebook report doesn't include data about increasing page views or frequency of visits, both of which help gauge the "vibrancy of a website." (Note: Kerner owns shares of Facebook).

And digital media analyst Greg Sterling said that he would need to see "at least three more months of hard, detailed data, to suggest that Facebook's best days are now behind it."

That said, Sterling still thinks the site may be vulnerable. "[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has characterized Facebook as a utility -- a communications utility -- but I'd argue that it hasn't yet made itself into one the way that Google has," Sterling told PEHub. "In the same same way that we joined Facebook because our friends did, we're likely to leave if those same friends become less engaged," he says.

The data pointing to slowdowns is definitely questionable, we think. Even Inside Facebook reports that "a person close to the company" says the site is still growing in the U.S. And Facebook is on track to reach 700 million users, thanks to growth in newer markets.

Plus, there is still China, population 1.3 billion. Facebook may be planning to enter that market through a relationship with Chinese search company Baidu in order to launch a new, separate and more tightly controlled social networking service, which may or may not connect with Facebook as it exists today.

But that, as they say, is past performance. The key question for potential investors is "How will Groupon do in the years ahead?" There, the IPO filing, doesn't provide much guidance.

Here are five concerns I see.

Email Open Rates

Groupon certainly knows those numbers. It might have left it out of its filling, called an S-1, for competitive reasons, but it might also be because the numbers are declining.

National and Local Deals Split

In my observation of Groupon, it's beginning to skew more toward national deals. That means lower margins as national merchants have the leverage to negotiate a better deal. Plus, there is a limit to the number of photo cards, mugs and custom T-shirts that someone can buy.

High Customer Acquisition Costs

Groupon points out that acquisition costs are a concern, but doesn't provide actual numbers. Doing the math based on other numbers provided, I estimate the cost of a list subscriber at $6.40 and the cost of an actual purchaser at $26.50. That's a big number for a business with few barriers to entry.

For Netflix, this number is $18.03 - but Netflix has a subscription business with recurring revenue. Groupon's numbers should be lower than Netflix'. I estimate that in order for Groupon to be profitable on a customer, they need to sell three average deals.

Decline in Margin From March 2010 to March 2011

Cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue was 54.8% and 58.1% for the three months ended March 31, 2010 and 2011, respectively. I would expect that costs of the deals will go up as Google beefs up competition, the economy recovers and a larger percentage of deals are national retailers who have more negotiating power. This will further reduce Groupon's margins.

Reliance on Competitors For Growth

Google and Facebook are big channels for subscriber acquisition. If these providers choose to stop competitive advertising, it'll constrain Groupon's subscriber growth. Google just launched its Offers product in Portland. (This post was written at the first Google Offers venue.) Based on the initial set of merchants and offers, I believe that Google is aggressively subsidizing these offers. To the extent that Google continues to do this, it will put a lot of margin pressure on Groupon and other deal providers. Google's product now offers merchants significantly more generous payment terms. If Groupon is forced to match those terms, it will put a constraint on working capital."

Question of Value to Merchants

While Groupon clearly provides outstanding discounts to consumers at local businesses, the value to the merchant has been hotly debated. An example in the S-1 cites a business that sold Groupons and "more than half of the Groupons were sold to new customers." That means close to half were sold to existing customers - a roughly 75% revenue hit on existing customers is something that merchants need to figure into their calculations.

In my conversations with merchants, they really resent seeing existing customers coming in with Groupons. If even 10% of customers using Groupon are existing customers of the merchant, that is a serious blow to the economics. (Anecdotally, I've seen some numbers as high as 90%.)

It becomes the second major tech company after LinkedIn to aim for the public market in the last month. The difference between Groupon and LinkedIn though is that Groupon makes significant revenue, has been around half as long as LinkedIn and may or may not actually be a technology company. What are the revenue and risk factors for investors thinking about Groupon stock? We take an in-depth look below.

Groupon measures its key operating metrics in terms of subscribers, customers, featured merchants and Groupons sold. In the first quarter of 2011 Groupon boasted 83.1 million subscribers worldwide with 15.8 million cumulative customers over 56,781 merchants. That equates to about 28 million Groupons sold in the quarter ending on March 31. In comparison to 2010, that is about 26 million more Groupons sold in the same time frame. So, the idea is: if you grow your business by $250 million in corresponding quarters (almost $20 million, first quarter 2010 and $270 million, first quarter 2011) then it is time to go public.

Weighing the Risk Factors

Groupon warns that it may not maintain the revenue growth that it has experienced since inception. It went from $3.3 million in the second quarter of 2009 to $644.7 million in the first quarter of this year, so that is a fairly reasonable warning. Groupon also does not know if the business model can be sustained or maintained.

"Our business has grown rapidly as merchants and consumers have increasingly used our marketplace," Groupon wrote in the S-1. "However, this is a new market which we only created in late 2008 and which has operated at a substantial scale for only a limited period of time. Given the limited history, it is difficult to predict whether this market will continue to grow or whether it can be maintained. We expect that the market will evolve in ways which may be difficult to predict."

Other risk factors for Groupon include: failure to retain or acquire subscribers; failure to stave off net loses due to operating expenses; failure to add or maintain new merchants; failure to hold off competition and clones; failure to recover subscriber acquisition costs (marketing expenses such as the infamous Super Bowl ads); disruption of email chain or email restrictions; international growth problems.

Those are the highlights of Groupon's risks, though the S-1 does go on for about 10 more pages outlining potential harmful market conditions including government regulation of e-commerce or losing members of the managerial team.

Operating At A Loss, But Come Along for the Ride

The majority of Groupon's revenue in the first quarter of 2011 was international with $346.8 million in sales accounting for 53.8% of revenue. The net loses mentioned in the risk factors could be detrimental to Groupon's long term viability. In the "net loss attributable to stockholders" column, Groupon lost $2 million in 2008, $6.9 million in 2009, $456.3 million in 2010 and $146 million so far in 2011.

The beginning of the Groupon S-1 filing starts with a letter to potential stockholders from CEO Andrew Mason. In it he states that Groupon spends aggressively on growth, is always reinventing itself and that it is "unusual and we like it that way."

"If you're thinking about investing, hopefully it's because, like me, you believe that Groupon is better positioned than any company in history to reshape local commerce," Mason said. "The speed of our growth reflects the enormous opportunity before us to create a more efficient local marketplace. As with any business in a 30-month-old industry, the path to success will have twists and turns, moments of brilliance and other moments of sheer stupidity."

It is mildly amazing for a social network that has never been profitable and never made more than $250 million in a year. What are investors seeing that the rest of us cannot? In a word ... Jobs. This is what Job Board 2.0 has become -- data rich and interactive across a social graph.

Data is like the gasoline of the Internet. Data comes from users. The Internet has matured to a point in the Western world where companies are now seeing huge growth in a short period of time in terms of users. LinkedIn has 100 million users that at one point or another have uploaded their basic employment information to the site. Most have uploaded full resumes, teaming with data like phone numbers and addresses, employment and education history.LinkedIn's primary revenue comes from its hiring solutions and premium accounts, both of which are steps to uncover more data on the service.

LinkedIn's growth and that of other social networks is not just a matter of having user data for the sake of having data. Numbers without context are useless. What LinkedIn has is personally identifiable data. Corporations and investors want to be able to track the consumer market as closely as possible to signal trends that will inform their next product launches. LinkedIn is a trove of data not just about people, but how people are making their money and what industries they are working in and how they connect to each other.

Big User Base + Jobs = Big Market Opportunity

Tech companies are taking longer to reach IPO than they were a decade ago when the industry bubble popped. LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and has been creating its user base for the better part of a decade. Companies are growing faster than they ever have before. LinkedIn user base has nearly doubled its user base since 2008. Twitter has certainly eclipsed 200 million accounts and possibly 300 million. Social gaming company Zynga jumped to near 100 million users in a matter of months. Investors are eyeing these big numbers and eagerly awaiting their public debuts. LinkedIn was the first and benefitted from that market sentiment.

"Tech is back," said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com. "I think we are back to the golden age in a big way."

Freelancer is a LinkedIn competitor and could not be happier for the spark that LinkedIn has ignited; "I think the doors have been kicked down and a freight train driven right through it, Barrie said.

The affect of LinkedIn's IPO to the Internet is subtle and Barrie believes that jobs are a big part of the professional social networks success.

"Look at the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K.," said Barrie referencing the English-speaking Internet base. "With [the Western world] coming online, paying $10 a day, the first thing they are going to want are jobs."

LinkedIn has the most traction and the most data in the professional social network environment, but it is not a standout and future monopoly, the way Google was when it debuted to the public. Google's technology was above and beyond what came before. That is not the same for LinkedIn. The traditional jobs sites - Monster, CareerBuilder - remain strong players in employment data and there are niche job boards across the Internet like JournalismJobs.com that are go-to destinations for certain industries.

There are other startups looking to gain traction by using employment data. BranchOut is a professional social network that extrapolates employment data from Facebook's 700 million or so users and recently raised $18 million in series. Like LinkedIn, BranchOut understands the meaning of data, interaction and connections when it comes to employment. With today's rousing success by LinkedIn, there will be more players in the employment connection space coming down the pipe.

LinkedIn initially priced its shares at $45 this morning, which was the high end of its target valuation. At one point, shares were trading at $122.70. As of 1 p.m. Eastern, they had dropped to $109.49. LinkedIn's revenue grew from $78.8 million in 2008 to $243 million in 2010. In a pre-IPO filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company said that its revenue works in cycles by the season and does not expect to be profitable in 2011.

LinkedIn was incorporated in 2003 and had 14 employees and 78,000 users that year. Flash forward eight years. LinkedIn had 990 employees and 90 million users as of Dec. 31, 2010. Just three months later as it prepares for its IPO, it has hired 298 more employees and has grown 100 million users as of March 31.

According to the SEC filing, a "substantial majority" of LinkedIn's page views come from a minority of members. At the same time, most LinkedIn members do not check their pages on a monthly basis. Over the years, revenue from premium subscriptions has dropped while the revenue from hiring solutions continues to grow.

LinkedIn forecasts that its revenue will fluctuate on a quarterly basis and that it may not be profitable in the long term. According to the filing, "We expect our revenue growth rate to decline, and, as our costs increase, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to sustain our profitability over the long term."

LinkedIn's major stockholders pre-IPO are founder Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee with 20.1%, Sequoia Capital with 17.8%, Greylock Partners with 15.6% and Bessemer Venture Partners with 4.8%. It is trading under the symbol LNKD.

Online music recommendation service Pandora has had quite the ride over the last several years. In 2006, ReadWriteWeb named it a runner-up in the yearly Best Little Company round-up and we had high hopes for the company. Four months later, we were writing about how Pandora founder Tim Westergren was appealing for help to "save Internet radio" from licensing fees. A year after that, the headline read "Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop".

Oh, how things can change. Nowadays, Pandora is everywhere, from computers to mobile phones to integrated car stereo systems. Today, the company has taken it one step further and filed for a $100 million IPO.

Pandora explained in the document that its service today is primarily a personalized radio station streamed over the Web and mobile phones, but in the future it has aspirations to do much more.

It wants to improve the service, develop new advertising products, build out its ad sales force, expand distribution to other consumer electronics and automobiles, and expand internationally. It also wants to add other types of content beyond music, such as radio formats, like talk radio or sports.

With the ubiquitous nature of Pandora these days, it's easy to forget how close to the brink the company once came. It wasn't until late 2009 - more than two years after we wrote about its near death experience - that it finally reached a deal with music labels.

Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson went through today's following and came up with a bunch of interesting stats that show off the company's recent successes. Here is an excerpt:

• Revenue for the 9 months ended October 31, 2010 was $90.12 million. That's an increase over 30.1 million over the same months in 2009.

• Net income in the first 9 months of 2010 was...a loss of $328,000. Pandora lost $18 million during the same months in 2009.

• Pandora has more than 80 million users in the US.

• During the first nine months of 2010, Pandora ad revenue reached $78 million. That's up from $29 million during the same period in 2009. That's huge growth.

• Subscription revenue was $12.3 million during the first 9 months of 2010. It was $4 million during the first 9 months of 2009. That's huge growth.

The New York Times' DealBook blog is reporting tonight that social buying site Groupon "is pushing ahead with plans for its initial public offering, a debut that could value the company at $15 billion or more." The site previously turned heads when it rejected Google's $6 billion acquisition offer and spurred many to begin discussing the dreaded "B-word" - Bubble.

The closest competitor in the market, LivingSocial, recently raised $175 million, a figure now dwarfed by Groupon's latest round. DealBook reports that Groupon may be trying to get while the getting's good:

Groupon, say analysts, may be moving quickly to take advantage of the market's momentum and the excitement around fast-growing Web companies.

"It's smart to strike while the iron is hot, and they're the most visible and fastest growing player in their market," said [Greg Sterling, an analyst and the founder of Sterling Market Intelligence]. "To wait a year would inject a level of uncertainty for the proposition of going public."

LinkedIn may not have all the mass consumer glamour of Facebook or Twitter, but many of its 85 million members pay for premium accounts with extra business networking features and the company pitches advertisers with user demographics skewing heavily toward the upper-middle class and above. Those two revenue streams have helped the company grow substantially since it launched in 2003, 1 year ahead of Facebook and 3 years ahead of Twitter.

I have criticized LinkedIn at every opportunity, however, for making moves that don't make sense and failing to deliver user data in some of the ways that would be most valuable. The company also insists on adding all kinds of messaging between users, importing Tweets and other such nonsense. It would be great if LinkedIn would stick to business and keep the Tweets on Twitter. I know I visit the site multiple times a day, but the unenthusiastic imported messaging just gets in the way.

Several years ago, ReadWriteWeb was scraping pages off of LinkedIn to capture updates about job changes by people in the tech industry. We would then write about those changes, linking to LinkedIn in every one of those posts. The company suspended my account when it found out so I talked to their business development department about the value we sought to add. They asked me how many page views we got each month, said they'd talk about it and never got back to me. I thought that was rather snobby and unhelpful, but it is a company that's always bragging about how many of its users make six figures, so what do you expect? The company turned my account back on the next time they wanted me to review a new feature, thankfully.

Like I said, I visit the site several times a day - and if I could get a feed of just the new jobs taken by my contacts, free of all the clutter of new connections made or recommendations posted, I'd visit LinkedIn all day long.

Can the company launch a big IPO? It probably can; as a growing number of business people come online, LinkedIn could become all the more useful. Would an IPO before Facebook's be beneficial for LinkedIn? That seems like a crap-shoot - the company could ride a wave of investment enthusiasm that arose from a Facebook IPO. It might be safest to go it alone and first, though.

But a healthy IPO market, one that is sustainable, actually does matter to all of us.

If we only have a handful of acquiring companies (basically today it is Google, Amazon and Microsoft, now that eBay and Yahoo are wounded), the AntiTrust hurdle becomes more real. Even if there is no AntiTrust issue, Google, Amazon and Microsoft simply cannot buy all those venture-backed companies.

So we need Groupon to go public and use their public currency to buy other ventures working on local advertising/ecommerce. That will be good news for lots of ventures. And a Groupon IPO success will spur on other ventures that are getting ready for IPO.

I don’t know if Groupon really have the solid financials to go public. We won’t know until they issue their prospectus to the SEC. Until then we only have rumor and speculation. But if I were a betting man, I would bet on Groupon being able to go public before Twitter. And, this will be more controversial, before Facebook. But that as they say is another story. I am not trying here to compile an actual list of ventures that could IPO in 2011. This is more about the general environment for IPOs.

This has been what Steve Blank calls the “lost decade” for tech IPOs. So why do I think that 2011 will be the year this changes? There are 5 reasons:

1. Private markets are under SEC scrutiny. This takes away the easy option of getting liquidity without either selling or going public. If you have more than 500 shareholders you have to make your financials public, it is the law.
2. There is a backlog of great companies that have the financial strength to IPO. The IPO market has been pretty well closed for a couple of years (some notable exceptions prove the rule). So the companies that have the potential to IPO have had more time to grow and get their act together.
3. Investors are hungry for growth outside emerging markets. GDP in America and Europe seems to have a ceiling at 3% and the Chindia and BRIC stories of emerging markets growing at 8-10% has created too much capital flowing to those markets (generating fears of a bubble). So investors want companies in the developed markets that can grow at really fast pace (at least 30%, ideally 60% plus) from a base of at least $100m revenue for a long time to come. That has to come primarily from tech/media ventures.
4. The macroeconomic picture is improving. Yes, there are always worries and another crash is always possible, but "markets always climb a wall of worry" and the general trends seem positive. But cycles don't last forever, so the people making these decisions (Boards and their Investment Bankers) will look at 2011 as a good window of opportunity.
5. The bean counters have figured out how to live with Sarbox. For a long time, Sarbanes Oxley ("Sarbox") regulatory overhead has been seen as a reason why you cannot run a public company. Baloney, as they say in Brooklyn. It is a simple bit of operational overhead, a rounding error for a great company.

IPO is still the golden ticket. Real entrepreneurs want to IPO. Getting acquired is a great way to build capital, but it is not the dream of the really driven, talented entrepreneurs. There are logical reasons for this. The valuation at IPO is usually (not always, plenty of exceptions to this rule) higher than you can get from an M&A exit. And more importantly for the entrepreneur, it is actually often easier to manage public market investors than a bunch of VC with different agendas. But logical reasons be damned, an IPO is simply the big badge of honor for the entrepreneur and the investors who back him/her.

It is not clear what we will call the decade that starts in a few days time – the “teens” maybe – but it will possibly be one where we get a sustainable IPO market for tech ventures. By “sustainable” I mean that it cannot be a return to the Dot Com bubble years. Only great companies with really solid financials will get through the IPO gate. And the valuations will have to remain grounded in reality (short sellers will ensure that is the case).

Here’s hoping. Happy New Year folks.

Of course, none of this really matters until Facebook goes public.

Later reports from Forbes in September of this year stirred the pot yet again, this time estimating Facebook's overall value at $23 billion. Others had previously estimated its valuation at $33 billion based on private share transactions. But excitement surrounding these claims was quickly met with reasoned backlash from 37 Signals' David Heinemier Hansson, who called the earlier reports "outrageous."

"The company has supposedly taken just under a billion dollars in venture capital and small secondary-market sales of stock," Hansson explained. "So the actual money that has changed hands is just 3% of the total valuation of the company," he wrote in September.

Not much has changed in the months sense. Or, in other words, minority investment valuations aren't real, as Hansson says. They're just interesting.

Similar "who knows?" sentiment is echoed today, in Bloomberg's own piece. It quotes Lise Buyer, founder of Class V Group, an IPO consulting firm in Portola Valley, California: "It could be a bargain at $41 billion," she said. "We won't know until it trades on the public markets." Exactly.

During the TV interview with Fox News on Monday, Thiel noted that the company plans to take a page from Google's playbook when it comes to the IPO's timing. In other words, said Thiel, "you do not go public until very, very late in the process."

These statements put a firmer timeline on the IPO than those that Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckberberg gave to The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. "We're going to go public eventually, because that's the contract that we have with our investors and our employees. We are definitely in no rush," he had told the paper in March.

What's Facebook Worth?

How much an IPO will be worth when it launches is still very much up in the air. The WSJ found some investors were anticipating a market capitalization of $35 to $40 billion, given a 2011 IPO. Lou Kerner, a former analyst at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, thought Facebook could be worth even more: $59 billion in 2011 and over $100 billion in 2015. More recently, others, such as 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson, have called these claims outrageous.

Meanwhile, Reuters' sources said Facebook revenue approached $800 million in 2009 and the company was already profitable.

Facebook now has over 500 million users and its backers include Digital Sky Technologies, Microsoft Corp, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing and venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.

No Love for Facebook Movie, "The Social Network"

In Thiel's TV interview, he also criticized the upcoming movie about the founding of Facebook called "The Social Network," saying that the film was full of "many inaccuracies" and "petty lies" and it was a "Hollywood portrayal of Silicon Valley where everything is a zero-sum game." The only positive thing he had to say about the movie was that it told "young Americans that they can still create great companies in this country."

Here's a YouTube clip of the original Fox News interview. (The Facebook statements are made at the 5:00 minute mark).

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/possible_facebook_ipo_in_2012_says_board_member.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/possible_facebook_ipo_in_2012_says_board_member.php Finance Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:37:17 -0800 Sarah Perez The New York Times is reporting this morning that Hulu, the streaming television show and movie website, is readying to go public "through an offering that could value the company at more than $2 billion".

The offering would follow other recent high-profile offerings in the past two weeks, first from Demand Media and then Skype.

The company recently released some numbers showing that it expected to double the $100 million it made in 2009. Still, PaidContent points to comScore stats that show Hulu as sitting in the tenth spot in the "top entertainment" category, with 24 million uniques, as compared to YouTube's 144 million uniques.

While both the New York Times and Paid Content question both the IPO market and how Hulu would fare in it, others, such as Daring Fireball's John Gruber come right out and say that a Hulu IPO might not work out. Gruber calls the whole thing "a little (a lot) premature" and notes that "they've got no revenue, and their content comes from companies that may well chose to create their own online publishing services."

Indeed, Hulu has already lost content from Comedy Central and has not been able to ink deals with both CBS and CW.